....As for the next pocket calculator? It will come, but Whitman concedes that it will take time. “Listen, R&D in the technology business is a longer-term gain,” she said during the call. “I think the investments we make in 2012, you’ll start to see in 2014 and 2015. I wish I could tell you differently, but it’s not true…. We cut out a lot of muscle in R&D at this company, and we have to invest back in it.”...

Since taking over, Whitman has very “engaged” with the labs and has made Banerjee a direct report. Previously, he had reported to the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. “She felt that HP Labs, the central research arm, is so important in terms of innovation for a technology company that she felt no this needs to be a direct report to me,” Banerjee says. “So we feel honored and thrilled, but it’s not just on paper. I mean, she is now tracking us on a very regular basis.”

That means that she’s tracking Project Moonshot too. Moonshot means low-powered servers right now, but HP has a few other technologies: its memristor memory chips — essentially a low-power alternative to flash — and photonic optical interconnects that could link up servers or even processors themselves. Banerjee thinks that new nanostore chips, which marry low-power processors with memristors, could be the ticket.

“Moonshot is step one of this big dream that we have. Our end point is we are going to have these tens of millions of low-power processors connected right next to these nonvolatile memory, based on memristors. And how are we going to connect these things up? Through optical interconnects?”

“Once we do this, it’s going to be a complete killer,” he adds. “Better than the calculator.”